5.1 Key Functionality Across Layers

When you look at a collection of layers, you will notice similar patterns between them. These patterns are usually navigate, move, create, delete, search, go faster, go slower, make larger and make slower actions. These are so prevalent that I even color coded these actions in the next section. The idea is then to have similar actions can be placed on the same key across different layers. So for example left movement is commonly on the j key. This pattern is repeated on editing/navigating, mouse, vs code editor, vs code terminal, browser, and slack layers as shown below.

Keyboard Layer	Shortcut description	Key
editing/navigating layer	left arrow	j
mouse layer	left cursor movement	j
vs code editor	move to left editor tab	j
vs code terminal	terminal focus previous	j
browser	scroll left	j
slack	go back to last group	j

When you have established patterns, then this makes creating new layouts easier because you can follow the same pattern depending on the action. This also makes learning the new layer easier as well since the actions are shared across many layers.